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Syrian men from the town of Ras al-Ain shout slogans after crossing border fences in the border town of Ceylanpinar, Sanliurfa province November 14, 2012. A Syrian warplane bombed the town of Ras al-Ain near the Turkish border for a third day on Wednesday as forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad pressed an air assault to dislodge rebels. REUTERS/Stringer

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Syria now has a new government-in-exile that allegedly unites all the groups seeking the overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad’s murderous regime.

But if this is the best they can do, Assad will still be in power next year, and perhaps for a long time afterwards.

It took a week of haggling in Qatar to bring all the fractious Syrian rebel groups together. Basically, the Gulf Arab countries and the United States told the Syrian rebels that if they wanted more money and arms, they had to create a united front.

So they did, kind of, but the fragility and underlying disunity of the new government-in-exile is implicit in its cumbersome name: The Syrian National Coalition for Opposition and Revolutionary Forces.

It’s actually just a loose collaboration between different sectarian and ethnic groups whose ultimate goals are widely divergent.

It is a real civil war now; the days of the non-violent Syrian democratic movement that tried to emulate the peaceful revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia are long past.

Moreover, it is by no means certain that Assad and the Baathist regime he leads will finally be defeated.

The Syrian government does not have enough troops to establish permanent military control over every rural area in a country of

24 million people.

However, it does have the strength to smash any attempts to create a rival authority in those rural areas, and it still holds most of the cities: The front line in Aleppo has scarcely moved since last summer.

How has Assad managed to hang on so long when other Arab dictators fell so quickly in the early days of the “Arab spring?”

Partly it is the fact that he’s not a one-man regime. The Baath Party he leads is an organization with almost half a century’s experience of power, and the Alawites who populate its higher offices fear a genocide if they lose control of the country.

The other thing Assad has going for him is the highly fragmented character of Syrian society.

Seventy percent of the population are Sunni Muslims, but the other 30% include Shias, Alawites, Druze and Christians, all of whom are nervous about Sunni Muslim domination in a post-Assad Syria.

In fact, the Syrian battlefield, after only a year of serious fighting, is already coming to resemble the Lebanese battlefield in 1976, after the first year of the civil war there.

Large tracts of the countryside are under the military control of the religious or ethnic group that makes up the local majority, while the front lines in the big cities have effectively congealed into semi-permanent boundaries. The stalemate then lasted until 1990.

There are obviously differences between the Lebanese and Syrian cases, but they are not big enough to justify any confidence that Syria’s future will be different from Lebanon’s past.

Assad will continue to have access to arms and money from Iran and Russia, and there will be no large-scale military intervention from outside to tilt the balance decisively one way or the other.

A split in the Baath Party or a military coup could open the way to national reconciliation if it happened relatively soon, but that is not likely.

Apart from that, the only thing that might really change all these calculations and break the stalemate is an Israeli attack on Iraq and a general Middle Eastern conflagration. That is not a price anybody wants to pay.

— Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.